Nove particolari in due tempi, 1984

The first eight plates represent a drawing featuring nine rectangles corresponding to the ensemble of plates included in the multiple itself. Each time, the rectangle that coincides with the plate in question contains a photographic fragment of the sky or the sea. Each of the plates also features a letter written in blue and in autograph calligraphy so as to compose, in the numbered sequence of plates, the name of the Greek goddess Mnemosyne. The ninth plate instead reproduces a male figure (taken from a seventeenth-century handbook about perspective), intent on observing and drawing, as indicated respectively by the blue lines that start from the eye and the image of a hand holding a pen.1 In the installed multiple, the figure is at the far right end, so that all the plates, open and arranged like in the drawing they reproduce, are inscribed in its field of vision, indicated by the extension of the visual rays from the eye in the individual plates.
No complete image is composed in the figure's gaze: the eye captures only the details in disarray of an incommensurable Whole, recalled by way of the spatial dimension of the sky and the sea, as well as through Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Nine Muses (the final “e” in her name is placed next to the figure's eye, at the top of its visual cone). The One is dispersed in the multiple, the vanishing point of the perspective moves farther away from infinity, like the horizon line of the sky and of the sea, like the immeasurable depth of memory and the supreme ideal represented by the Muses.
The title refers to the nine plates that make up the multiple and to the potential for enjoying the work in two distinct times: on the one hand, as a book,2 and on the other as a composition.
The multiple brings together the iconographic theme of the large-scale work titled Hortus clausus, 1981 (GPO-0442) and the theme of Mnemosyne developed between 1979 and 1981 (GPO-0420, GPO-0426, GPO-0460, GPC-0570, GPC-0792). It also harkens back to the thematic core of a work on paper made in 1983, originally titled L’exil du cygne (nove particolari in due tempi) (GPC-0641); the seated viewer, as a variant of the standing figure introduced in 1981, appears for the first time in this multiple and in several studies on paper from the same period (cf. GPC-0656, GPC-1649).

1 The hand borrowed from the plate in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751) is characterized by nine numbers and illustrates the “proper way to hold a pen” to write with.
2 In the colophon the multiple is designated as a book. The typological classification of this type of publication is not necessarily univocal: these are hybrid creations – book, portfolio, object – characterized by the same ambiguities implicit in the expression “artist's book”, which often transcends the borders of a pre-defined category.